Open Source Resources for Web Application Developers

CKEditor is a Version 3.0 of FCKeditor. After almost two years of intensive development, the first stable version of CKEditor 3.0 has finally released.

CKEditor is a complete rewrite of our so loved FCKeditor, which got a bit old after six years of great success. Not to say that FCKeditor is doing bad, but there are some new things we could bring to it, and CKEditor is the result of it. There are dozens of new features in CKEditor.

CKEditor is fast to load and fast to use. The development team stayed focused to bring the best performance you can have, using all modern best practices. You’ll be amazed with it.

You’ll note that they have also a brand new UI based on the Kama skin. Other than modern, Kama is colorful like a chameleon, so you can precisely match its color to your needs. This is an innovative and unique feature you’ll find in CKEditor only.

The CKEditor code is also much different now. It’s up to date with the new JavaScript development requirements, offering a rich and powerful integration and interaction API. The editor is totally plugin based, and it can be extended and modified in all senses to fit all needs.

Requirements: Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari and Opera
Demo: http://ckeditor.com/demo
License: GPL, LGPL, MIT License

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Picok stands for Personal Information Cockpit. It’s an open source software package, aimed at enabling users to build their personal information dashboards. The users content is loaded into small draggable boxes, so called portlets, and layed out in a tabbed column-based interface. There are a quite few standard portlets shipped with Picok, but since it is an open system, maintainers of picok installations can easily create portlets of their own.

Picok is written in PHP 5, uses the Yahoo User Interface Library and Zend Framework Components and supports MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, IBM Lotus Notes and is ready to be integrated into your corporate intranet, website or community platform as well.

Requirements: Yahoo User Interface Library
Demo: http://www.picok.org/en/
License: GPL 3.0 License

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In-Field Labels jQuery Plugin is a simple plugin that turns properly formatted HTML forms into forms with in-field label support. Labels fade when the field is focussed and disappear when text entry begins. Clearing a field and leaving brings back the label.

There are some major benefits. The input element or textarea never really has content, so validation can proceed without first checking for the field value. It takes one line of jQuery code to implement. And its compatible with all modern browsers (And even IE6, the “not-so-modern” browser).

Requirements: jQuery Framework
Demo: http://fuelyourcoding.com/in-field-labels/
License: GPL, MIT License

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Open Web Analytics (OWA) is an open source web analytics framework written in PHP. OWA was born out of the need for an open source framework that could be used to easily add web analytics features to web sites and applications.

The OWA framework also comes with built-in support for popular web applications such as Wordpress and MediaWiki. As a generic web analytics framework, OWA can be extended to track and analyze any web application.

Requirements: PHP 4.4.2+, GD library
Demo: http://www.openwebanalytics.com/
License: GPL 2.0 License

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UIZE (pronounced “you eyes”) is a powerful, open source, object oriented JavaScript framework – supporting widgets, AJAX, DOM, templates, and more. UIZE allows you to create more effective user interfaces in your Web-based applications and services.

UIZE does not extend native objects, and supports interoperability with other libraries that adhere to this principle. UIZE is server agnostic – so you can use it with any choice of server language and platform, including Java (Apache TomCat), C# (IIS / ASP.NET), Visual Basic (IIS / ASP), C/C++, Perl (Perl / Apache), PHP, Ruby (Ruby on Rails), Python, etc.

Requirements: -
Demo: http://www.uize.com/
License: GPL License

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Filament Group wrote an article describing how to use JavaScript to scrape data from an HTML table and generate charts using the HTML 5 Canvas element. The technique is particularly useful because the data for the visualization already exists in the page in structured tabular format, making it accessible to people who browse the web with a screen reader or other assistive technology.

Now they have rewritten and extended the code behind the technique and packaged it up as a new jQuery plugin called “Visualize“, which you can download. The plugin provides a simple method for generating bar, line, area, and pie charts from an HTML table, and allows you to configure them in a variety of ways.

Requirements: IE6, IE7, IE8, Firefox 2, Firefox 3.5, Safari 3 and 4, Opera 9
Demo: http://www.filamentgroup.com/examples/charting_v2/index_2.php
License: MIT, GPL License

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PhotoDiary is a web application which lets you to easily publish a brand new photo blog on the web. The application frontend is built upon Flash technology and data is managed through a dedicated web control panel, developed in PHP.

The interesting thing about PhotoDiary is that users who are viewing your PhotoDiary are able to add comments by putting yellow sticky notes on the photos.

To run PhotoDiary on your own web server, support for MySQL, PHP and GD Library technologies is required. This software is published according to a GNU GPL3.

Requirements: Flash,MySQL, PHP and GD Library
Demo: http://photodiary.webgriffe.com/demo/
License: GPL v3 License

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UIzard is an in-browser web application development tool built on various Javascript Framework. You can add and arrange UI components easily by using Drag & Drop in-browser environment. You can also edit JavaScript Code or Html Code on the in-browser environment without operating other editors. You can preview the result of your works immediately.

UIzard is an open source project, following GPL v2 License. However, it is only a beta version so it can be a little unstable at the moment. You can always see UIzard in action here.

Requirements: -
Demo: http://uizard.org/UIzard/uizard.php?action=newProject
License: GPL v2 License

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The jQuery BlockUI Plugin lets you simulate synchronous behavior when using AJAX, without locking the browser. When activated, it will prevent user activity with the page (or part of the page) until it is deactivated.

BlockUI adds elements to the DOM to give it both the appearance and behavior of blocking user interaction. It is particular useful for creating loading screen for web application. BlockUI is compatible with jQuery v1.2.3 and later.

Requirements: jQuery Framework v1.2.3+
Demo: http://malsup.com/jquery/block/
License: MIT, GPL License

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jQuery Tools is a collection of the most important user-interface components for today’s websites. This single JavaScript file weighs only 5.8 Kb. This library contains some useful JavaScript tools like tabs, tooltips, accordions, overlays, smooth navigation, great visual effects and all those “web 2.0″ goodies that you have seen on your favourite websites.

You don’t need to be a programmer to use these tools. They have lots of Demos you can explore and you can copy their source code to your site and things will work. Each tool is used in a similar manner and by learning one tool you can easily learn the other tools.

And above all, the library is constantly maintained and updated. Expect to see new releases coming out on a regular basis. This library is dual licensed under MIT and GPL 2+ licenses.

Requirements: jQuery Framework
Demo: http://flowplayer.org/tools/demos/index.html
License: MIT, GPL 2+ License

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